by David Jurk
“Uh, right.”
Taking a breath, she began asking a series of questions. What chart areas would I like activated? What was my GlobeNet account ID? What was my weather forecasting and alert service preference? Did I prefer passive alerts or active? She could see that I had radar – did I get the integrated model? Yes? Awesome!
It went on like that for fifteen minutes; with each answer, she’d speak to ‘Ray’ and it would confirm what she told it. Finally, she said I needed to talk to it myself for a bit so that it would learn my voice instead of hers; it needed to know who the captain was. And oh, and by the way, even the basic AI could provide a custom voice. Would I prefer something a bit more interesting?
I thought about it a moment.
“Sure,” I said. “Let’s give him an Australian accent.”
She heartily approved, it seemed, and after a bit of back-and-forth, I was told by a pleasant male Aussie voice that everything was ready. I smiled, and Emma beamed.
“OK, then” she said, brushing her hands against her thighs. “We gotta get moved.”
“Moved?” I said doubtfully.
“Well, yeah. We can’t stay here.”
She looked at me appraisingly and asked if I wanted to drive. Hell no, but I couldn’t possibly tell this female child that. So, I nodded.
She went to the forward line and released it without being asked, then turned and looked at me, waiting. OK, then. I reached over and pulled the aft line loose. Here we go. We were floating gently, still aligned along the dock. There was no current to speak of, this should be easy.
My mind seemed only half-working; I moved without really thinking anything through. Had I considered it rationally, I would’ve recognized the need for a soft touch, beyond thoughtful, rational action seemed beyond me at the moment. I wrapped my fingers around both throttles – so familiar to me from countless dry runs in the barn – and just automatically did what I’d always done in those moments of imagining; I gave them a nice, satisfying, solid shove forward. But this was no dry run; everything was operational, and we were in water.
The surge forward was so abrupt and powerful, I nearly fell over backwards.
“Christ!” I yelled. My mind was a complete, fumbling blank.
And it turned out that Emma had a command voice.
“Off!” she shouted. No panic, no fear, just do it now.
Right, the throttles. I clawed them backwards; the boat slowed, drifted another few meters forward then stopped. It stopped primarily because Emma had tossed a loop of line around a piling, quickly pushed a fender between the ama she was standing on and the cement side of the dock, saving us from a healthy impact. She tied the line off and walked calmly back to where I stood shaken to the core.
“It’s OK,” she said. “Takes practice.”
“Right.”
“Why don’t I drive, and I can show you some stuff?”
Good grief, this kid was like a miniature adult. I wondered briefly if I should just try it again, but I had no pride left anyway.
“I’d appreciate that,” I said.
She asked me to go forward and release the line, then motioned me back to her so I could watch her demonstrate the simple, but very powerful, advantage that two independent motors provide. Gently nudging the starboard prop – she called it a ‘screw’ - into reverse, she barely touched the port throttle, and Windswept silently swung her stern cleanly to the right – to starboard – away from the dock. Then, very gently reversing those positions, she brought the bow out as well. Once we were lined up straight in the middle of the channel, she centered both throttles in a forward position, barely off the stops, and we were headed down the waterway in complete control. She hadn’t so much as touched the rudder.
“See?” she said. “It’s easy!”
I just looked at her.
“Want to do the turn?” she asked. I considered it.
“Nope.”
“OK,” she agreed cheerfully, “let’s get out to the area where your mooring is, and I’ll watch while you practice a little. There’s more room out there.”
We got to the mooring as though we were on rails; she made it look like the simplest thing in the world. When we were out of the inner dock area, she had me take over. She led me through some basic maneuvering; first one throttle, then both, and then more advanced maneuvers using both throttles and rudder combined. In half an hour, I had learned more, gained more confidence, than in all the boat handling I’d done before in my life. Once I got the feel for what the throttles could do, working together, I felt unstoppable. I managed a fast three-sixty, all the while staying within a meter or so of where we started. Emma laughed with delight, applauding, and I grinned and bowed. I was on cloud nine and would look back on this moment many times in the coming days as the beginning, the real beginning.
“OK, I really gotta get back,” she said. “My mom has some stuff I need to get done.” She bounced child-like on the forward trampoline, reminding me just how young she was.
“Got it,” I told her, and pointed to the kayak. “That’s our taxi.”
She drooled over it. I was touched nearly to the point of tears. The kayak was the first boat I’d ever built – in many ways, it started all of this.
“Are you available for adoption?” I asked. She laughed.
“You can’t afford me.”
We paddled it back to the dock. The mooring was maybe two hundred meters out into the harbor, and I couldn’t help but stop at the halfway point, to turn and stare at Windswept floating there, darkly luminous against the late afternoon sun. I was just overwhelmed by her and sat unmoving until Emma coughed gently, and I smiled an apology, took up my paddle and went on.
At the dock, she refused the money I offered her.
“Mom would kill me,” she said.
“It’s a tip,” I told her, “for a great job.” But she shook her head, smiling.
“It was fun!”
I watched as she skipped away from the dock. There, I thought, goes a girl with a future.
I swept the kayak into a quick one-eighty, anxious to be back on Windswept. The sun was going down; my first evening on board awaited me.
Yet, once I was back on board I was caught in a paralyzing eddy of uncertainty, unable to focus on a task long enough to complete it. The very fact of being on the boat seemed magical and I found myself standing transfixed, staring in fascination at the most mundane scenes; the galley shelves, the cabin heater, the view out the forward port holes. I completely gave up any hope of getting work done and just surrendered myself to the madness and sat back in the cockpit with a glass of Irish Whiskey, watching the boats around me, feeling the evening quieting the sounds of the marina. I felt almost overwhelmed with a sense of anticipation and pulled out my list, suddenly realizing before I’d read the first item that I’d brought no coffee on board, no food for breakfast, no bedding. I glanced briefly at the kayak; no, I wasn’t going to head back now. I grabbed a sail cover out of the locker to use as a blanket and settled back down with the whiskey. The sun slowly melted into the water.
I had done it. I said I would bring her to the Pacific, and here she was. Too tired for further reflection, too lonely to rejoice and still too aware of my incompetence to feel much elation, I finally went below, wrapped myself in the sail cover and stretched out on the starboard settee.
My life on Windswept had begun.
CHAPTER EIGHT
I WAS AWAKENED by two squabbling gulls that managed, by the time I staggered on deck, to leave bird shit all over the forward hatch. I made a mental note to buy a plastic hawk or owl to frighten them away; something I’d learned in Maine. The morning was clear and cool and lovely; I sat for a few minutes, feeling the water beneath us and Windswept’s quick motion in the light morning swells. Hanging just above the eastern horizon, as I turned to look for signs of weather, was the red nova, the nascent sunrise serving as backlight. It ought to have been pretty; somehow it wasn’t.
The need
for coffee was overwhelming all other instincts; sitting and watching the morning come to life on the water would have to wait. The kayak slid easily into the water and I headed for the main docks, a trip that was already becoming pretty damn familiar. I’d spotted a small café yesterday perched along one of the wharfs – one of those places making a business out of serving the boating crowd. I suppose I was one of them now. It was already open, so I had coffee and a surprisingly good breakfast, and felt very much the newcomer as I watched the regulars around me.
An older couple sat perched at the coffee bar along the wall, chatting to the waitress with an easy familiarity. I couldn’t help but overhear them; they were consumed by worry over the events in China. The waitress was dismissive.
“It’ll never make the States,” she declared, “and even if it does, we’ve got medicine and real doctors, not that acupuncture stuff.”
The old guy didn’t seem convinced; this python thing – well, he was scared of this one.
“What are you gonna do, then?” the waitress asked him.
“Leave,” he said. “Take the boat to Baja and wait it out.”
She frowned, hands on hips. “How’s that gonna help?”
He muttered something about avoiding big cities, but I thought she’d hit the nail on the head. If the virus was truly as contagious as it seemed, even a single person would be enough to infect an entire small town. To me, the question was the virus itself; was it vigorous enough to survive and continue to spread? Could it evade attempts to create a vaccine? And if were so, then there wouldn’t be anywhere to escape to, unless you hid in a room and stayed there. And then I thought, or maybe went out alone on a boat in the middle of an ocean?
Fully awake now and anxious to attack the endless list of things I needed to do, I walked aback to the marina, to get the pickup. And as I drove to the chandlery for the first of the many items on the ‘to buy’ list, I couldn’t help but replay the discussion in the café. The old man’s intent to get the hell out of Dodge seemed, on the face of it, an overreaction. The virus hadn’t appeared in the States, so why leave? But I wondered, if it did – if someone, say, in New York, came down with it, what then? Would it change anything? Would I want to leave, too? The question was chilling, and I couldn’t answer it. But it occurred to me that either way – whether it happened or not - I had the same goal in front of me; to get the boat ready. I needed to set the sails, check the rigging, check the autopilot, check the instruments – a thousand things, a thousand little shakedowns, a thousand little lessons. Stay focused on that, I told myself, and worry later.
As the day wore on, as I made trips to an endless progression of shops, sorting the packages into manageable loads and paddling them to the boat, I felt increasingly sanguine; the day was too beautiful, too peaceful, to feel threatened by a deadly plague. It was in China, not here. And I narrowed my focus to the challenges of provisioning; I bought a sleeping bag, pillows, and other bedding, and spent a long day sorting everything out. I worked hard to load Windswept in a way that wouldn’t compromise her speed and safety. Heavy things like tools and spares and canned food toward amidships, lighter things like dry food, clothes and blankets toward the ends. I set up the water maker, then the desiccating head. And I bought a plastic hawk and lashed it to a forward stanchion. Take that, you shit birds.
And finally, my old rifle, my Winchester .308. Rachel had always argued that we should take it, I’d always countered that we shouldn’t. You have a gun, I said, you find a reason to use it. Don’t take one, she argued, and the time would come when you wished you had. So, I brought it – more in homage to her than any belief I’d need it, much less use it. I couldn’t decide on a place for it, so I stuffed it under the mattress of the port settee, thinking it’d be a cold day in hell before it would ever see the light of day.
By four that afternoon, I felt like I’d accomplished something; enough that I bought some beer and sat in the sun on the boat enjoying one while I reviewed the now dog-eared list. I was actually a little concerned that I’d overdone it. Long and narrow, Windswept’s design intentionally sacrificed load capacity in exchange for speed and safety. She’d sail overloaded, of course, but it would be one thing to be overloaded sitting here in this harbor and another entirely out on the sea. Everything I’ve done – the water maker to avoid the need for heavy tankage, the desiccating head to eliminate holding tanks, even the electric motors were chosen over other choices because they eliminated the need to store heavy fuel. All of this as a nod to the god of lightness. I’d even put the Irish whiskey into plastic bottles to save the weight of glass.
And by then, the worry had all faded into a distant nightmare – a thing of dark dreams, unreal and impossible. I at the thought that I was actually preparing to put to sea. I wasn’t going anywhere – at least, not anytime soon.
Loaded with what I was sure must constitute at least a month’s worth of food, and all the gear, Windswept still sat slightly above her waterline. I was pleased; we were provisioned with weight to spare – perhaps two or three hundred pounds of capacity yet. This was a good thing; there may be gear or tools I haven’t thought of yet. Perhaps, since I had the capacity, I should be adding another drive battery. And there were still other things to get done; check all the rigging, hank on the sails and make sure all the fair leads, cleats, pulleys and winches were working as they should. Test the autopilot, test all the electronics. But there was plenty of time to get to all that. Have another beer, enjoy the beautiful day.
The afternoon passed into evening and I went below, to the small galley, and prepared my first meal. I’d wanted an old-fashioned kerosene stove, mostly I suppose for emotional reasons. We’d done a lot of backpacking; we were familiar with the tricks needed to use kerosene reliably. And Rachel had found an old beauty, an antique, really: an Optimus two-burner in a gleaming brass frame, half a century old. We’d played with it a bit, but not much more than that. Now I used it to cook a meal: nothing more involved than boiling a quart of water for freeze-dried spaghetti and meatballs, but there was a deep satisfaction in just seeing it in place and functioning. I ran my hands over the warm brass and smiled, recalled her lecturing me: We’re sharing the cooking. I’m not signing on as first mate; I’m co-captain.
And later, sitting in the cockpit watching what was now my second sunset on the water, I decided to check the weather on the laptop, thinking perhaps tomorrow I’d brave a trip out of the marina, get Windswept into open water, hank on sails and check the rigging and the autopilot. Except I never got to the weather. My browser opened to Google Global News and there was a single screaming headline. The plague was here. Not just China, impossibly far away, it was here in the States. And moreover, it was in San Francisco, a mere six hundred kilometers from me.
I stared in complete, utter disbelief. Two families – a total of four adults and five children – have died in a San Francisco hospital from the flu virus; all in this single day. They had returned together – twenty-two days ago - from a trip to Hong Kong with no indication of illness until late last night. Now they were all dead. Neighbors were being quarantined, and I wondered what earthly good that’d do? Could they find and quarantine everyone these people had contact with in the last twenty-two days? Could they quarantine everyone that had been on the plane carrying those people home from Hong Kong, and everyone all those people had contact with? Everyone in the stores, on the street, in church, at the park, in the bank, in school, at the doctor’s office, the lawyer’s office, and on and on and on. Twenty-two days of spreading infection out across the city, then out further and further, spiraling out to more and more people. I saw it clearly – the endless, unstoppable spread and I knew then that whatever that dream had been at Hanging Lake – whether Rachel had somehow actually spoken to me or not – didn’t matter. The warning was real. What was happening in China would now be happening here and we had no more means of stopping it than the Chinese had; I was certain of it. Even now as I sat in this harbor, there were
– beyond any doubt - people that were infected, people that could infect me. And I wouldn’t be able to recognize them when they came; it might be the guy delivering parts to the boat store where I’d just bought spare bearings for the water maker. It might be some guy in his private plane flying down from San Francisco to go fishing for a couple of days. Maybe the waitress in the café this morning had been in San Francisco over the weekend visiting her mother and crossed paths with this family and I was already dead.
Stop, just stop. It was theoretically possible, but not likely. And again, the memory of Hanging Lake came to me and I found comfort in it, a sense of safety that I had no rational explanation for. Rachel told me to leave quickly; it was a warning, not a dirge. She hadn’t come to me to tell me I was about to die; she’d come to warn me to act, so that I would live.
And even now, I was isolated here in this harbor, at this mooring. Unless someone boarded me, I was safe where I was. Unless I went ashore and continued to push my luck, I couldn’t be infected. I looked around the harbor in the fading light. The mooring lights from other boats were beginning to come on, white and red, and I imagined a bubble existing around Windswept with me inside. But the bubble was fragile; I dimly heard the San Diego traffic in the background, saw movement around me both on the water and on shore. Imagine the virus here, people panicked, thinking they had time to get away; the roads are jammed. Wouldn’t more than a few think of grabbing a boat and escaping by sea? Would a man desperate to save his family hesitate to try to take my boat by force? And how would I stop anyone from boarding me? There was the Winchester; could I shoot someone?
I was safe on Windswept, but she was not safe in this harbor, in this city. She was not safe near land. The words came again; get out. Get out into blue water and head west across the Pacific.
